Editorial and Opinion

What characters were rip-offs of others? Are comics and pro wrestling actually tied together? Is the story from the comic better than the story in the movie? Just what the heck was happening in comics in the 90’s?

These are some questions any reasonable human being who contributes a portion of their weekly salary to the funny books may ask. The Flickcast alumni Jonathan ‘Wally’ Weilbaecher and I join forces with Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles to answer these and more.

With regulars Joe Slepski of The Joe on Joe podcast, Pablo Romero-Estevez and Alan ‘Sizzler’ Kistler of Crazy Sexy Geeks and some guests like Lucha Underground’s Joey Ryan and The Flickcast co-founder Matt Raub, we haven’t come to many conclusions but we have had a ton of fun arguing our way there.

Take two things geeks love, collecting and gaming, and you have a recipe for fun. But add a price tag to them and you have a potential recipe for disaster. It is universally accepted that geek culture isn’t a cheap one.

Most of it revolves around specific purchases that help people fall in to varying groups. You have StarWars fans, Trekkies, Doctor Who fans, LotR fans, gamers, roleplayers, LARPers, miniature tabletop players and a horde of others who fall into at least one, but usually multiples, of these options. And how do they show it? Usually with t-shirts, wallets, bags, wristbands, or any other number of options. But there are certain geek hobbies like collectible card games that take the obsessions of the geek culture to dangerous levels.

Collectible card games (CCGs for short) are games where players build their own deck out of an ongoing and ever growing collection of cards composed of those from starter packs and booster packs. Usually the packs have a distribution of cards between mostly common, some uncommon and a single rare. The more packs you purchase and you’ll likely find even harder to find special cards. In Magic: The Gathering, these would be Mythic Rares.

Usually a box of 36 packs will only contain a certain number of these sought after cards. The better the card and more rare it is will lead to players spending more between either pack purchases or just buying a card directly.

Working in both the entertainment industry and in YouTube, you’re bound to hear a lot of silly things said. “There’s no way people would want to watch someone else play video games.” “She looked like she had to be 18, right?” “He can’t wait to put me in his next feature.” But there’s one statement that you hear and you just know people are full of it.

When prepping for SDCC this year, I was asking a bunch of friends from various social circles who was heading to Comic Con and there was a common thread from those who weren’t going. They all used the phrase, “I think everyone is over Comic Con.”

Now I can see where this statement might be coming from. One could argue that year after year San Diego Comic Con can start to wear you a little thin by the end of it. No sleep, bad diet and abundance of partying can kick your butt. But when you look back a month later after recovering from the nerd flu you inevitably were stricken with a few days after it ended, you’re up and ready to rock once again.

But this year, there seem to be people claiming that “everyone” is over the Con. And this is where I call them out on it.

You know what NFL? You’ve lost me forever. I never cared about your “sport” anyway. I sort of cared about Madden because it at least helped sell video game systems during the holiday seasons. But now, you’ve gone too far. Yesterday, the NFL announced they’d be banning “nonstandard/overbuilt” facemasks.

This includes Oakland Raiders defensive end Justin Tuck’s mask that resembled that of Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now I don’t know who that is but damn them for not allowing a Shredder mask. They have also announced that the similar Bane styled masks will also be a part of this ban.

Now what is funny is the reason for the ban: because they don’t live up to NFL safety standards. The group of gargantuan men who are doing everything they can to throw their body weight on top of each other as fast as possible is worried about safety? Meanwhile hockey lets people play with a rubber puck flying at their face with no protection. Makes a lot of sense.

Well now I have given up on ever giving football a shot. The best chance they have is stepping their game up and creating a hybrid of the XFL and whatever the heck futuristic version of the game that they play in Starship Troopers and when they do it’s Team Shredder vs. Team Bane vs. Team Casey Jones vs. Team Mysterio.

It has come to be accepted that during the summer months, comic book stores are destined to be the home of big annual event books. Since House of M, every year Marvel has pushed out event after event with varying levels of success and long term effect. These events have been as discussed as who is a Skrull in Secret Invasion to the utter lack of attention paid to titles like Infinity.

But what makes one event a bigger deal than another? And ultimately, why does no one seem to care at all about Original Sin?

On the surface, the central idea of OriginalSin is an interesting one. There is a murder mystery around who killed the Watcher, one of Marvel’s most iconic upper B-squad characters. But quickly you start to care really about who killed him because in comics no one stays dead forever so it doesn’t really matter since big baldy is going to come back eventually.

Every now and then, those of us who have been around longer get on our high horses and dispense what we consider guidance while those we speak to may consider it unsolicited rambling. But hey, we’re older so you have to respect us dammit — especially the young geeks of the world.

We know it’s a hard life but let’s be clear, you have it a lot easier than we did. Back when we were younger, playing video games, Magic: The Gathering and AD&D 4th Edition usually meant you’d catch some teasing and probably not get laid. Well, in some circles by the time you hit 30, the latter two may still be true but at least now gaming is incredibly common and not a symbol of geekdom.

But if you’ve done the whole growing up thing right, you wouldn’t be so worried about what people are going to think by the time you’ve hit 30 and have probably found yourself a quality group of cohorts who won’t be making fun of you for playing AD&D 4th Edition. They will be the ones who will be giving you a hard time because you rolled a 1 and fell onto the blade of your own sword by accident.

So when you find these friends you can pull out your Monster Manual and get cracking… except for those who “fell off” their game when they stopped playing around 15. And while some packed their cards and games and figured neatly away just in case, we know tons who got rid of everything. They sold it off way cheaper than they knew they should have or in some cases just got rid of it.

The start of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a little rough. After the first episode, not much really happened and the name Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. quickly became synonymous with the bitter comic book audience with saying that not much was going on. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. came back to the new year with by far one of their best episodes only to put us on a two week hiatus.

And then last night it came back with another great episode, some quality references to events of some of the movies, some great comic book fan “ah ha!” moments and a cliffhanger ending. Did Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actually get it right?

Well I’ll leave it to Eric for his episode recap for you to decide about how good the episode was. My problem actually came from the preview for the next episode… that will be airing on March 4th. Yes. You read that right. March 4th. As in one month away. Not for nothing guys but what is that? We take a break, get one episode, and then it’s another month? That’s garbage.

I am a fan of Skylanders. It is just plain casual fun for me. To sit down, explore levels that aren’t exceptionally difficult and unlock the hidden items and secret paths is something that helps put me at ease. Not that there are a lot of mainstream games that are hard anymore with a few exceptions, there’s something I just enjoy about kicking back and playing Skylanders or checking out the stack of them on my shelf. But there is one thing I don’t like: The Release Schedule

When I play a game, I binge on it. I start playing it and I am content to go from start to finish and in most cases, that’ll be the majority of the time I spend with the game. Though I will go back to occasionally achievement hunt or if someone wants to hop on multiplayer or even have a party game while over my place, things usually wrap up once I have beat the game and move onto the next.

But because of the level design of the games and release schedule of the Skylanders figures, there are times that it is actually impossible for me to get as much out of the game as I want until months after release. This time with Skylanders: SWAP Force it ended up being three months and one week before I had the proper combination of figures to experience the majority of the title.

About a year ago, crowdfunding was the big buzz word. If you had talent but wanted to remain independent or you just weren’t big enough to make it to the desk of a major studio, developer, publisher or manufacturer, you would head to Kickstarter (or maybe Indiegogo) and put a call out to your audience and see what they could do to help get your project going.

Early on, there were some huge successes with millions of dollars going into funding. But then, you couldn’t escape it. If you were an entertainment writer of any kind be it movie, music or gaming, your email box didn’t go a week without hearing about “the next big thing… that just needs crowdfunding” and quickly that frequency has continued to increase.

If somehow it was possible to ensure that the projects being put on Kickstarter and then publicized everywhere were of a certain quality, this wouldn’t be an issue. But the more I hear about and see the bad ones, the less likely I am to check out the good ones. Now instead of going and browsing Kickstarter on my own, I only head over if someone has directly recommended one to me and that has to be someone I trust the opinion of.

This is especially evident in the gaming category. You have one or two higher profile titles and everything else is derivative and unoriginal fluff.

The lines were drawn some time ago in this latest generation of the console war. With shots being fired all around since the consoles were officially announced to feature sets and launch titles, things have gotten messy.

And even though we are lucky enough to get review copies of games here on a regular basis, we didn’t get our hands on a freebie for either the XBox One or PlayStation 4. When budget came in to effect, I had to choose which side I’d be backing and since there could be only One… (You see what I did there?)

In the end, it came down to two things. The first is that I have bought both a PlayStation 3 and a Vita but the majority of my collection of games in the last generation were for the XBox 360. More people I knew played multiplayer on XBox 360 so for things like Call of Duty: Ghost and Grand Theft Auto V, that’s where people already were.

And as silly as they might be, I have become an achievement whore over the past 8 years and try as they might, Sony’s trophies don’t have the same effect on me. I cracked over 50,000 in one generation, I need to top it in the next.